How much air pressure should you fill the pneumatic wheels with?

[Tzury-Orbit1690]

My team is working with WCP 6" pneumatic wheels and we were wondering how much air pressure should we fill?
Right now we are working with about 25 PSI but we are not sure about what is the optimal air pressure for these kinds of wheels.

[MrBasse]

Originally Posted by Tzury-Orbit1690

My team is working with WCP 6" pneumatic wheels and we were wondering how much air pressure should we fill?
Right now we are working with about 25 PSI but we are not sure about what is the optimal air pressure for these kinds of wheels.

I would fill them until they are full. What full is will be completely dependent on your application. We are running our center wheels at 35 psi and our outer wheels at 25 psi right now. We might up that depending on how much weight we have to lug around after all our subsystems are mounted.

[GeeTwo]

Fuller tires (up to the rated pressure of the tire) will give you better performance and durability on level ground. Lower tire pressure (though enough that the rims don't hard stop against an obstruction) will give you better grip for climbing over obstacles, at a cost of frame efficiency and shorter tread life. It seems best to use the highest pressure that reliably gets you over all the obstacles you intend to cross.

[abross]

As reference, when I go offroading, I air down my tires from around 28 psi to 13 psi. This number came from a lot of guess and check to see what pressure worked best for me.

Obviously, these 6" wheels (my team is also using these) are much smaller, so the difference in contact area when airing down will be drastically different, but I do have some neat reference pictures.





My team hasn't tested this yet as we are waiting to see how heavy the total robot will be. My suggestion, put your robot on the rock wall so the front wheels are on the edge of the wall, then start letting air out until the edge pushes into the wheel so you have contact on the vertical and horizontal face of the wall. This is obviously just an example and you can use this idea on any obstacle, but this is how we plan on testing ours.

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

we got 25 psi on a 8 wd. We get good traction and they're hard enough so we don't hit the plastic rims when going duke of hazard mode on the rock wall